A Mother and Daughter and a Town Made of ‘Brass’

Picture a place called Waterbury, Conn., and you might, as I did, imagine rows of Victorian houses with wide porches, driveways lined with expensive cars, beloved daughters with bright and easy futures. But Xhenet Aliu’s perceptive debut novel, “Brass,” offers a reminder that assumptions — whether about a place, or a person as close to you as your mother — never tell the full story.

In Aliu’s Waterbury, daughters aren’t exactly wanted. Instead of Victorians, there are triple-deckers, their porches lined with railings that flex against a body’s weight. Meals are sometimes labeled “GRADE D BUT EDIBLE.” The brass factories that had once made the town attractive to waves of Eastern European immigrants have long been closed, though the grandchildren of those hopeful workers remain, largely trapped in dead-end jobs. Aliu’s characters, most of whom have seen little of the world outside of Waterbury, understand at a visceral level that to live costs money; everything in this novel — the rubber soles on sneakers, bread from the Hostess outlet, an ultrasound — is quantified. One narrative thread is uneasily resolved when a character upgrades from an air mattress to a bed. For Elsie and Lulu, the mother and daughter at the center of the book, the most valuable thing in Waterbury is a ticket out.

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“Brass” is their duet, and Elsie sings the opening note. She is the young granddaughter of Lithuanian immigrants, a waitress, with a doomed crush on Bashkim, an Albanian line cook with secrets back home. In an abrupt second chapter shift, their 17-year-old daughter Luljeta takes over, narrating in a second person that feels appropriate for a girl in the middle of crisis. Lulu, a soft-spoken, Honor Roll student, has just been rejected by N.Y.U. and suspended for fighting, all in the course of a single day. The plot advances through each woman’s story; as the symmetries between them pile up, along with misunderstandings, the novel accumulates momentum and emotional power. In Elsie’s storyline, we’re reading for Lulu’s arrival; meanwhile, in the narrative present, Lulu is rejecting her mother to pursue the mystery of the father who left her behind.

After Lulu’s suspension, Elsie, switching to the third person, accuses her daughter of not acting like herself: “Don’t try to tell me. I’m her mother. You think I don’t know Luljeta?” It’s one of many funny exchanges in “Brass” — what daughter hasn’t heard her mother say such a thing — but it’s also a deft illustration of the way both women are hemmed in by the other’s long-held assumptions. “And then it’s infuriating, your mother’s need for you,” Lulu says, later. “It’s not fair that you should serve as her primary motivation for getting out of bed in the morning, especially considering that you have no idea what the hell you want from your own life, other than to get out of this crap town and figure it out elsewhere.” Reading that, I both wanted Lulu to “get out,” and to shake her for being so ungrateful. They’ll never see each other, or themselves, as clearly as the reader gets to see them both — that’s the magic trick here. In granting the reader access to both women’s interiority, Aliu brings to life the simple, heartbreaking fact that though our stories can intersect, we’re ourselves alone.

Except, maybe, when we are still part of our mothers. For fear of spoiling it, all I will say about the moment Elsie and Lulu meet for the first time is that it transformed what was already a unique coming-of-age story and an incisive reckoning with class in America to something unforgettably wise and powerful. From its opening page, “Brass” simmers with anger — the all too real byproduct of working hard for not enough, of being a woman in a place where women have little value, of getting knocked down one too many times. But when the simmer breaks into a boil, Aliu alchemizes that anger into love, and in doing so creates one of the most potent dramatizations of the bond between mother and daughter that I’ve ever read.

Of course, the ending note is Lulu’s — as the daughter, she will finish what her mother started. It’s the kind of quiet closing gesture that feels less like an ending than an opening. I left this book with the sure sense that the characters were alive beyond its pages, though I wouldn’t dare try to guess what they are up to — Elsie and Lulu are too real for that.